Bringing the Engineer out of retirement

Squidly has forced Gnomeaggedon to put on his long forgotten Engineers apron, dust off his drafting board and design a better system.

Unfortunately Gnomeaggedon is no longer an Engineer, hasn’t been in over 20 levels, so he isn’t going to be creating Gnomeaggedon’s Improved Marketing, Planning & Party Engagement Device.

No, the G.I.M.P.P.E.D. will have to wait for an experienced Master Engineer to step forward. Maybe one of Blizzards own can divert their explosive research from creating the Cataclysm to ensure that people can communicate beyond the apocolypse.

Beyond Cross-Battlegroup LFG.

The forthcoming Cross-Battlegroup LFG channel is a very exciting development in Gnomish engineering (if it works, it’s a Gnome invention… If it doesn’t, it’s a Goblin invention). Apparently it’s built on the back of the Engineering masterpiece that will ensure you can be launched into an instance any time of the day or night… Or is that instances can be launched at us… Mmmm, nevermind.

Engineering gone too far.

The thing is that Engineers, like Mages, often go too far. They built a device or delve into the arcane to solve a simple problem, one right in front of you, and end up launching you into another continent… or universe!

With the appropriate amount of planning, it shouldn’t be necessary to launch portals to other worlds. Why shop on the otherside of the universe when you can find your meat(shield) at home?

Here are some simple improvements to the Calendar and LFG experience that I hope the Master Engineers at Blizzard read and implement.

LFG any instance

Unfortunately Slave Pens was considered too low level for my level 80 toon. Not too low level for me to enter, or even use the summoning stone. Not too low level for me to need to go there and ROLFStomp the boss… but, it was too low level to find a group in the LFG interface.

WTF! I thought you wanted me to do the instance Blizzard! I thought you wanted me to find a group for it! Why did you make it so hard?

Strangely enough, the calendar allows you to select any instance or raid or just about anything, no matter what level you are.

Nicely organized into expansions, it makes life easy to advertise within your guild or invite your mates.

Please Blizz, give us the whole list. Let us decides whether the instance is below our uber skills, or a challenge for our fledgling skills.

I have noticed that this is even worse at low levels. No sooner is Squidly eligible for an instance in LFG, than he dings and it disappears off the list. I still want to do them, but now you are making my life difficult!

Summoning stones that work.

I ran RFK the other night with a full party… Mind you this instance had dropped off my LFG interface… But I have already whinged about that.

The next problem was that although I and one other party member were in Theramore, the rest were miles away.

This shouldn’t be a problem right… But it was. See I was too high a level (or they were too low) for me to be able to summon them. In fact it turned out there were only 2 of the 5 that could initiate the summons… Both of whom were waiting for a summons.

Please Blizzard, let me summon anyone… As it was there were only 4 levels difference between us… Why oh why couldn’t I cleave a 1/2 hour off the instance start time by summoning them?

Calendar: Invite Guilds

The in game calendar is great and my mates & I have used it quite a bit to schedule our Friday night runs. Our guilds use it a lot as well, it makes it much easier to see who is coming, or more importantly, to be able to give notice of the intention, or desire, to run an event.

There’s just one tinsy wincy problem… You can invite your guild and specific individuals, but you can’t broaden that offer.

How many guild alliances are there?

How many of us are associated with multiple guilds either through alts or past history?

Why can’t I invite additional guilds as well as specific individuals?

It’s great that you can do a Mass Invite, but it’s still limited to your Guild or Arena team, it would be fantastic if they just stretched it a little further…

Calendar: Invite Server

Of course sometimes, especially with lower level alts, it would still be difficult to get a full group from within your guild and even guild alliances.

Currently your only option is to form your raid and join LFG. Hope the classes you want haven’t already joined a PuG, or log on and join LFG while you are waiting…

While your raid start time ticks down and expires, while your raiders get toey thinking about all the other things they could be doing, thinking about how the 21 people present could be broken down into 2 x 10 man raids… Who cares who misses out as long a it isn’t you!

Why can’t you make your event server wide. You know, guild sign ups by Monday, guild alliance then offered until Thursday, then if there are still spots, open the event to the server.

That way people can plan what time they will log on and start to raid because they have pre-booked their PuG slot, meaning the raid doesn’t have to wait for one more, you know they are coming!

Calendar: Invite Battlegroup

Taking it one step further, once the cross-battlegroup LFG comes in, why not open it up to the battlegroup? If your raid leader is on 2 hours before start time, they open it to everyone without sitting in LFG and come raid time you are GTG!

Armory App with teeth.

So now we have all the tools we need to get the raid and instance seats pre-booked, we just need one more thing.

A little bit more flexibility in using our out-of-game tools.

The Calendar functions available on wowarmory.com and the iPhone app allow you to browse calendar events. They even allow you to accept or decline them! If only they would allow a little more.

I would love to be able to create and edit events out of the game. As I am theoretically online only one day a week, this means I need to plan next weeks events while I am running tis weeks events.

If I need to add, delete or change an event outside of my Friday night, I still need to login to WoW.

Come on Blizz, give me an Armory App with teeth. Something that allows me to bite off, chew up and spit out new or amended events.

LFG in its current form is vile. I agree. When Midsummer was going on, I wound up running Ahune about nineteen hundred times with my (then) GM because he was farming for the pet and couldn’t find a group any other way.

I can absolutely see why there will never be a server wide calendar system. Can you imagine the amount of spam would be sent if anyone could invite anyone else? Gold sellers would issue invites in the hope of pushing their websites and many people’s calendars would probably be clogged up with large amounts of invites from people wanting boosts.

The LFG tool does sound like it could do with improvements, but any system that is server or battlegroup wide needs to be something people opt into rather than risk spamming people that have no interest in whatever is being planned. Though it would be very cool to be able to schedule server wide stuff like world PvP or naked gnome races etc.

We currently use Group Calendar for in-game scheduling and it is actually quite nifty. I can do events where I invite guildies by level and/or rank (very useful when not all your members are into raiding). You can also invite people from your friends list. We did briefly try to do some runs with another guild and that was all done through Group Calendar. GC sits on top of the calendar, so if people don’t have the addon it shows up in the normal calendar.

The only thing to be wary of with it is the version number. You want 5 or higher and at least when we started using it 5 was beta and it took a lot of clicking around on Curse to convince it to let us have the beta version.